‘When Matthew gets better, maybe you’ll get round to clearing the air with him once and for all,’ he said to me one day when I managed to escape from the hospital. ‘You’re breaking my heart, Charlie. I can’t watch you suffer like this. You have to stop blaming yourself. Stop blaming us.’

But I couldn’t, and so when Tom was offered the opportunity to audition for a band in London, I knew I couldn’t for one second hold him back.

‘Come with me, please,’ he begged me when we were lying in bed one Sunday morning in late January. ‘We’ll rent somewhere small and take every gig that comes our way. Maybe you could ask for a career break from school? I know someone who took six months out to travel and they kept the job open so when they—’

I must admit that my gut instinct was to just pack up and go, to follow my heart and live a life in London with the man I love, doing what we both love, living a life that I know is true to my soul, but the decision was out of my hands.

Another decision to stay or go – this time I wasn’t taking any chances.

‘Oh Tom, I would love to go with you more than anything, but I can’t, not yet,’ I told him, watching as I broke his heart once and for all. ‘I can’t leave, not for a long time. But who knows, maybe I could follow you when things get better here?’

Matthew had by now come out of the critical stage but still had a mountain to climb and it was consuming all of our lives. We’d worked out a rota between the six of us – Mam, Dad, me, Emily, Kevin and Martin – which meant that we could make sure he was never alone, even if at times he didn’t know we were there at all. New words and phrases like ‘blunt trauma’, ‘haematoma’, and ‘axonal damage’ flood our everyday vocabulary while we lean on doctors who we now know by first name.

Emily thought I was mad not to take up Tom’s offer.

‘You’re only a few hours away for goodness’ sake,’ she told me. ‘You can’t carry this burden around forever, Charlotte. You’ve punished yourself enough. Go with Tom! Go and try it out and we will all still be here if you ever want to come back. Sometimes you have to make decisions for yourself. You want to go, right?’

I nodded, crying as always when I thought of Tom leaving.

‘Then go!’ she said. ‘Matthew will understand eventually. You can’t let what happened to him define the rest of your life. His feelings have done that for long enough already.’

But I couldn’t do it. My own guilty conscience was in battle with my breaking heart, and my conscience won.